The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson

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The Sociology of Slavery - Orlando Patterson


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rules of racial assignment, its notions of whiteness and racial purity combined with the peculiar eventual recognition of legal equality for the more prosperous of the mixed group, and the general ‘white bias’ of the society that lingers to this day,89 originates in the interaction of coloured and whites and their joint contempt for blackness, enslaved or not. As the novelist and slaveholder Matthew Lewis perceptively observed: ‘nor can the separation of castes in India be more rigidly observed than that of complexional shades among the Creoles’.90 A peculiar feature of Jamaican slave society, which it shared with its American counterpart, was its hostility to manumission throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Economist Ronald Finlay and I have shown that manumitted played a critical role in the maintenance and stability of most large-scale slave systems, especially where enslaved outnumbered the slaveholder population, playing important middlemen roles as well as reinforcing feelings of self-degradation among the enslaved.91 Although Jamaican white slaveholders recognized this, it is typical of the racist vehemence and notions of racial purity that they only reluctantly came to embrace this principle of self-preservation, a problem well explored in Newman’s recent study.92 A substantial literature has emerged on the subject since Goveia and Brathwaite’s works.93 While the strong emphasis on the abolitionist period may be justified on the grounds that this was when the group grew substantially in numbers and importance, there is still much to be written on the subject in the early and classic 18th-century periods of the society, as the works of Livesay, Burnard and Newman have clearly demonstrated.94

      A growing number of first-rate works from younger scholars indicate that the historiography of dominion studies on Jamaica continues to thrive, most notably those by Petley,95 Ryden,96 Smith97 and Graham.98 A recent trend is to locate Jamaican dominion studies within the broader context of the Atlantic framework of historical scholarship, what has been called the ‘Atlanticization’ of slavery studies, from which has emerged a vast body of scholarship. Eric Williams’ enormously influential work is, of course, the classic study in this area,99 which has generated a huge literature of critics and defenders.100 As a comparative historical sociologist I can hardly complain about this development although it is worth bearing in mind the words of one of Jamaica’s most eminent historians, Franklin Knight, who cautioned that such studies should never lose sight of the fact that the Caribbean society being studied should steadfastly remain ‘the main event’.101

      The next major turning point was the shift towards primary sources and more precise quantification by scholars such as David Eltis, David Richardson, Herbet S. Klein, Henry Gemery, Jan Hogendorn, John Thornton, J. E. Inikori, among many others. The third main development came with the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-Atlantic slave trade databases. This enormously valuable resource, called ‘the gold standard of digital humanities’, originating in earlier work by Herbert Klein, Jean Mettas, Serge and Michelle Daget and David Richardson, evolved into a single multisource dataset through the joint work of David Eltis, Stephen Behrendt and David Richardson, who received critical support in the formative stage of the project from Harvard’s W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research (and later the Harvard Hutchin’s Center), with later support from funding agencies and universities, especially Emory where it was located for twenty years after leaving Harvard,114 and now Rice University, to which it moved in 2021.

      Curtin had already noted that a disproportionate number of slaves landed in the Caribbean. However, for students of West Indian enslavement, and for Jamaica in particular, the database indicates that, in both proportionate and absolute terms, the numbers going to Jamaica were staggering. The new map, from the project’s valuable set of Introductory Maps,116 visually indicates the extraordinary numbers that went to the Caribbean, especially Jamaica, when compared with North America. Having carefully followed the development of the database over the years, I have repeatedly drawn on it to update the estimated numbers going to Jamaica and the regions from which the Africans arriving in the island came.

      How do these recent figures compare with my estimates of over 55 years ago? In the first place, far more slaves went to


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